If I were to walk into a photocopy shop and ask for a duplicate of a
copyright-protected book, the shop workers would show me the door.
It does not matter whether I intended to distribute snippets of the
text around the world or do anything else with the copy — the
courts have ruled that the unlicensed duplication of an in-copyright
book is illegal.

But when the University of Minnesota announces plans to digitally
duplicate books, including copyright-protected works, in a
commercial project with Internet giant Google (Star Tribune, June
7), it calls the effort groundbreaking and valuable.

As an author who teaches at the University of Minnesota, I wonder
how I will talk to students about academic honesty and integrity
when the university itself shows such disrespect for intellectual
property rights. At the very least, the U should have awaited the
resolution of the serious legal challenges to the Google Print
project before letting Google have its way with the precious library collection.

Setting aside the question of whether Google is exercising fair use,
that last bit is the most telling to me: “letting Google have its way
with the precious library collection.” I agree that it is a precious
collection, but what does he want to do? Lock up all the books to
protect them from the prying eyes of knowledge seekers?

It seems to me the purpose of a library is to provide access to
knowledge. If Google can help make the content of library books more
accessible to searchers, it is doing a Good Thing. (And it’s great if
the U doesn’t have to spend millions of dollars to do the job itself,
although there are concerns and potential downsides to letting a private
company create this index. I absolutely think Google
should be able to do it, but will we then tend to let the public
collection and public digitization efforts fall into neglect?)

Remember (and I did a 30 minute preso here to explain it)
Google Books proposed to scan 18,000,000 books. Of those, 16% were
in the public domain, and 9% were in copyright, and in print. That
means, 75% of the books Google would scan are out of print but
presumptively under copyright.

The publishers and Google already have deals for the 9%. And being
in the public domain, no one needs a deal for the 16%. So the only
thing the publishers might be complaining about is the 75% which are
out of print and presumptively under copyright.

With respect to these, Google intends to index the books, and make
them searchable. If a hit comes through the search engine, Google
offers snippets of the text relevant to the search. The page
includes links to libraries where the book might be borrowed; it
includes links to book stores where the book might be purchased.
And, I take it, if the “publishers”? were to choose to publish the
book again, it would also include a link to that publisher.

Finally, any author who wants to be removed from this index can be
removed. As with Google on the net, anyone can opt out.

If you put it that way, it sounds like there is a lot of public benefit
to this project. It certainly does seem like a “groundbreaking and
valuable” effort. One of the big problems with copyright is that it
hinders access to a large number of books that are in copyright but out
of print. Google’s Book Search would help us find these books. (It might
have been helpful in my own recent search for buried treasure.)

Information will be emancipated. Publishers will either adapt to a world
in which copying is easy and everywhere, or they’ll die off. Unless they
can buy off the politicians they need and get some nasty laws passed…
oh, oh. Congressmen go pretty cheap these days. Let’s hope for success
for Mr. Lessig in his new pursuit.

Attribution

Thanks to timetrax23 and Nrbelex for freely sharing their photos on
Flickr! (Click on the pictures above to see larger versions.)